After discussing recent evidence of brain changes during the “falling in love” syndrome (for example, “men tended to show more activity in two regions in the brain: ….visual…. and ….. penile….”), Randall Parker proposes a high tech solution to the nation’s marriage woes:
We need drugs that will keep people happily married. The cost of divorce and illegitimacy for society is terrible. In some societies marriage for child-rearing is becoming the exception. This means childen are less well cared for and they do not turn out as well in terms of educational attainment, crime rates, and general success in life. Split ups of households lower the living standards as it costs more to maintain two separate households. If we accept the evolutionary psychology argument about why people fall in and out of love it seems to me that the problem is that humans have not been selected for to behave in a way most optimal for extended child-raising and this problem needs to be fixed pharmacologically. Everything from the declining strength of religious belief to the mass media portrayals of tempting objects of affections are reducing forces holding marriage together with tragic results.
We can not fix this problem with gene therapy because that is going to take a lot longer to develop. Many potential gene therapies will have to be done on fetuses and therefore their results will not be felt until the babies grow to be adults. Also, many people might oppose the idea of genetically engineering their children to be highly monogamous and faithful by nature But we might be able to keep people together with pharmaceuticals.
Take whatever biochemical state people have in the initial flush of love. Imagne being able to maintain that feeling for years with both partners agreeing to do so together. Imagine a drug which. if you took it while looking at a particular person, that person would, as a result, look very sexy to you. Think about how much happier everyone would be if they weren’t all walking around thinking that the grass looked greener on that unattainable other side of the river. Imagine that the sexiness of a lover never wore out or got old. A lot of married people would stay together a lot longer and long enough to raise kids to adulthood of they could use drugs to maintain their attraction to each other.
Science may eventually be able to produce the love potions of mythical stories and modern fantasy TV shows and movies. Love drugs could help prevent and reverse the decline of marriage. If this became possible the benefits would be substantial.
Maybe people wouldn’t spend as much time fretting about such things as the “institution” of marriage. Instead, they’d be focused on their own lives, their own marriages.
Without miring myself yet again in the quicksand of same sex marriage (although a good example of the quagmire can be seen in Rosemary Esmay’s heartfelt post, along with the reactions thereto), I am not sure that marriage as an institution is a proper concern of government. It’s a little analogous to enforcing charity; once you force people to be good, they are no longer good, because they lack a choice. This might also explain the rather odd phenomenon I’ve seen repeatedly of successful couples who live together for years, but no sooner do they get married than trouble starts.
Well, with Big Brother breathing down your necks, can the marriage really be said to be yours?
Hell, what do I know? I’ve never been married.
Does that mean I belong in an institution?
Couldn’t I just take the drugs?
ADDITIONAL NOTE: I am not alone in my inclination that marriage is not an institution. Here’s Joe Kelley:
Homosexuality strikes me as wholly unnatural and unhealthy.
Yet, and this is the most important part, what other people do with their marriage has no bearing on mine.
Those who tout the ?institution? of marriage are Chicken Littles screaming about the sky falling. Marriage is not an institution, it?s an intimate and personal arrangement you have with the person you love.
Yeah, and whose business is that? I have enough government in my life.
Comments
4 responses to “Drugs work better than government!”
If people do not get married and they have kids they will end up demanding more government help to raise the kids. High illegitimacy and high divorce rates of those with kids translates into larger government.
If you want limited government (and I have no idea whether you do or not) then you should be marriage as the context in which most children are raised.
Meant to say “then you should be for marriage”.
Thank you Randall! Your points are quite valid. Bear in mind that I was not arguing against marriage at all.
Rather, in my satirical way, I meant to question the role of government in marriage, which I think is out of hand, and getting worse.
Yes, marriage is an institution. You can have an intimate and personal arrangement without getting married. So, no, marriage is not just an intimate and personal arrangement between two people.
Also, marriage does not even have to be intimate. A couple could get married, reproduce by artificial insemination and never even sleep in the same bed. What marriage ought to be is something that increases the odds that children will be properly taken care of. If they are not properly raised then that creates costs for the rest of us.
In the argument about marriage “rights” the main societal purpose of marriage has been lost: to provide for children financially, emotionally, and otherwise. Marriage is not a right. Marriage is an institution which is for reproduction and child-raising. The goal of marriage should be to minimize the costs to the rest of society caused by children not being properly raised.
I certainly agree that the government is doing things that are making the state of marriage and the desirability of marriage worse. But marriage is still a net benefit for tens of millions of children in the United States and therefore it is still a net benefit to society as a whole.